Slack snags Foursquare veep to run new AI and machine learning office

Noah Weiss enters, begs world to apply for jobs

Noah Weiss, formerly the senior veep of product management at Foursquare, has been snagged by biz-chatter biz Slack to head up its new Search, Learning, and Intelligence group.

Alongside opening an office in New York, Weiss will be encouraging the platform's expansion by developing artificial intelligence tools for customers.

In a blog post, Weiss stated that he and Stewart Butterfield, who founded Flickr before launching Slack, had pontificated on what areas Slack ought to make "a big, new investment in" during 2016.

"We went through a slew of ideas," Weiss said of their conversation:

[M]ining message histories to help alert people of relevant and timely messages, using the work graph to help people connect with internal experts, making the existing search significantly better for companies with rich message and file histories, building conversational knowledge bots, and more.

Slack recently announced that it had hired Keith Adams, formerly an AI bod at Facebook, as its chief architect. Adams entered alongside a new chief security officer, Geoff Belknap.

Weiss wrote of his background working on search and recommendation systems, including as product manager at Google where he lead the structure search team on a project which evolved into the Knowledge Graph.

"The focus is on building features that make Slack better the bigger a company is and the more it uses Slack," wrote Weiss. Got that? ®